The Need
This is the central issue. Today, no device is connected to the alarm in Gladys: the house has an arming mode, the sensors live on their own, and it’s up to each user to manually link them in their scenes.
Concretely, with about fifteen opening detectors and a few motion detectors, you have to write and maintain the logic « if the alarm is armed and this sensor goes to open, then trigger » yourself. Multiplied by the sensors and by the modes, this results in many similar scenes. Adding a detector requires revisiting several of them, and a forgotten one leaves a gap in the protection without anything indicating it.
What is Expected
The ability to declare, once and for all, the list of sensors that participate in the alarm — and for each, in which modes it is active. A motion detector in the living room should monitor when you are away, but not when you are sleeping in the house.
Then, Gladys takes care of the monitoring alone: when the alarm is armed in a mode, only the sensors checked for that mode can make it switch to « triggered ». Scenes no longer need to know what to monitor — they react to the triggering.
And if you remove a device from Gladys, you simply remove its attachment to the alarm and its mode assignments: the rest of the configuration is not affected.
What It Would Look Like
MONITORED SENSORS + Add a sensor
Presence Night Absence
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Front door Entry ☑ ☑ ☑
Kitchen window Kitchen ☑ ☑ ☑
Living room window Living room ☑ ☑ ☑
Living room motion Living room ☐ ☐ ☑
Hallway motion Hallway ☐ ☑ ☑
Garage door Garage ☑ ☑ ☑
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Active 4 5 6
Questions to Decide
- Which devices can become alarm sensors? Opening and motion are obvious. And presence, vibration, glass break, smoke, gas, flood? A camera that detects motion?
- What value is intrusion? We always take « open / detected », or should it be possible to configure it per sensor?
- What does Gladys do with a silent sensor? Dead battery, offline for three days: should it be reported, refuse arming, or ignore it?
- If a second sensor triggers while the alarm is already sounding, should there be a new event (to know where the intruder passed) or is it noise?
Complexity and Dependencies
High — this is the big piece of the project, and the building block on which the entry delay, pre-arming verification, and zones depend. It itself depends on nothing, but it has much more interest with an available night mode.
It does not replace scenes: Gladys decides there is an intrusion, the scenes decide what to do next (siren, lights, notification, cameras).
Related Requests: this block conditions the entry delay, the pre-arming verification, the zones and the scenes context.
This request is part of a set from the discussion Gladys Alarm System (needs F01 and F03).